I got a call on my mobile on Christmas Eve (24 Dec) 2007 at about 3:30 AM. I was at work and had heard on #olpc-help in IRC that there was a official volunteer team being put together to support OLPC users, starting with the thousands of G1G1 donors. I'd sent mail to the address of the fellow from OLPC who was pulling it together, and he called me in the early morning (for him). We talked for a bit and he made me some accounts and pointed out a few things. Soon I was in the various support channels and started to realize just how work this was all going to be...

Prior to that I had heard about the OLPC project years ago, and had been tracking some of the software a little bit. I'd pulled a few images to run in emulation and read some mailing lists and wiki pages. When the G1G1 XOs started to ship, I started hanging out on IRC to ... uh, well mostly we whined about not having ours yet. (This would develop into a theme) Quite a few people were also helping by answering questions, even before #olpc-help existed and it is from this pool that some of the first SGers were recruited.

Since my G1G1 XO came in, and since joining the SG, I have learned a great deal about how both the XO and the community function and they are both quite amazing. I am happy to have the opportunity to contribute. There's plenty of work for everyone, so if you'd like to help please see the main OLPC:Support gang page and sign up!

Next Time: More about what the Support Gang does, and more introductions!

IRC : IRC is the ancient Internet Relay Chat system where a lot of OLPC staff, developers, and volunteers can be found at various hours.

G1G1 : The Give One Get program in Nov and Dec 2007 got more than 70,000 XOs donated to children in Mongolia, Haiti (FIXME) and the same number in circulation to children, educators, and hackers in the United States and Canada.